Executive Summary of the 2012 Report

18 March 2013This report presents the Hong Kong tourist satisfaction indices for the year 2012 and the newly added tourism service quality indices for the first time. The tourism service quality index aims at looking at service performance of Hong Kong’s tourism industry. Given the close relationship between customer satisfaction and service quality, measuring service quality is of strategic importance for the industry to boost tourist satisfaction. This is because service quality is an antecedent of customer satisfaction, laying out a foundation for evaluating customer satisfaction. In addition to a total of 45 tourist satisfaction indices released annually since 2009, we computed another 45 corresponding tourism service quality indices for the year 2012. These two sets of indices are comparable as both are grounded in theories of customer satisfaction and service quality and are underpinned by same methodologies and computation approaches.

The 2012 PolyU Tourist Satisfaction Index scores 75.07 on the scale of 0 to 100, increasing 2.46 points from 72.61 in the previous year. It remains so far the highest tourist satisfaction index since 2009. This reflects that tourists are increasingly more satisfied with Hong Kong. When comparing with other destinations, Hong Kong has outperformed the four destinations — Macau, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Zhuhai — which have adopted the framework of PolyU Tourist Satisfaction Index. This suggests the competitiveness of Hong Kong in providing tourism service excellence and attracting international tourists. Four years of tourist satisfaction index from 2009 to 2012 shows that the market-level index is really stable, with the Americas scoring the highest, followed by Australia, New Zealand and Pacific, Europe, Africa and Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, Mainland China, Taiwan and Macau and Japan and Korea.

The PolyU Tourism Service Quality Index for 2012 is 75.37. This index is a weighted average of the indices of the six tourism-related service sectors. The Americas scores the highest of 79.17, followed by Australia, New Zealand and Pacific (78.71), Europe, Africa and Middle East (78.38), South and Southeast Asia (78.05), Mainland China (72.81), Taiwan and Macau (71.92) and Japan and Korea (68.31). As for the six tourism service sectors, transportation earns the highest tourism service quality index of 78.32, followed by immigration (75.65), attraction (75.10), hotel (74.65), restaurant (74.30) and retail shop (73.52). Among the six service sectors, immigration is the largest contributor to Hong Kong’s overall tourism service quality index, making up 22% and is also one of the important contributors to the market-level tourism service quality indices.